Are MMORPGs an evolutionary dead end? What is an evolutionary dead end anyway, and how to torture an analogy (part II)

 This is part two of a post I put up yesterday.  I orginally put up both parts at once, but after sleeping on it I decided to break it up.  Even for my blog , where my readers must be unusually patient with long-form rambling, it was a likely a very TLDR inducing post :-)

Having set the stage, I can now move into the idea that motivated this garrulous post duology.  I speculate that MMORPGs were the first games to occupy the shared digital world product niche, and by getting there first they perhaps had more success than they really could maintain.  We can think about an analogous process in organic evolution, where there are all sorts of ecological niches that will get filled by some organism given enough evolutionary time and opportunity.  When we look in the geological record of various time periods, or sometimes in different regions during a given era, we see different groups filling those roles. Often the later species to fill a given niche are more complex organisms that members of earlier lineages that filled the same role would have trouble competing with.

 

Pterygotids, also known as "sea scorpions."  Some of these species were the top predators of their ecosystems, and the largest arthropods known to have existed. This and following images via wikmedia commons. I guess I could have used AI for these, but I actually wanted accurate images.

For example, one niche that is particularly dramatic and easy to think about is the "top predator" niche.  In any given ecosystem there are usually a few species near the very top of food webs, that as adults can prey upon any other species they come across and are themselves almost immune to predation.  Think of a lion in modern African ecosystems, a tiger in Asian ones, or a polar bear in the arctic.  In marine environments the progression of top predators over geological time was especially dramatic.  The first marine top predators were various types of invertebrates, culminating in the Pterygotids.  This groups includes the largest arthropods ever known to have existed, and were almost certainly among the top predators of their environments.  However, a basic arthropod design has some serious disadvantages when it comes to being a truly large animal.  Among the primary issues is that the skeleton is on the outside of the muscles.  That means that the size and weight of the skeletal elements increases faster than the power of the muscles that move them around as you keep scaling up in overall body size.  So the largest sea scorpions were probably large as animal using that basic bauplan can get and still function well, at least here on earth.

One of the earliest known vertebrates, Haikouichthys.  This little fellow lived over half a billion years ago, and was only about an inch long.  For one of the biggest sea scorpions, it would not have even warranted notice as a snack.

Vertebrates had also been trucking along for a while at that point, but until the Devonian period they didn't get particularly big.  However, they had one huge advantage.  By having a basic design where you put the supporting skeleton on the inside and the muscles that power it on the outside, they are able to achieve much larger functional body sizes than any arthropod could ever hope to.  Being really big is also pretty important for a top predator, as they need to be able to overpower anything they want to eat.  In the Devonian, around 385 million years ago, we see the first big aquatic vertebrates filling the top predator niche in their local ecosystems.  From there we see a progression of a variety of top predators coming from different vertebrate taxonomic groups, culminating in two absolutely monstrous animals that lived in the same time and place and may never be equaled again.  Though to be fair even the relatively paltry orcas and great white sharks of today are still very impressive animals that would have killed a sea scorpion (the top image) with ease.

The first really impressive vertebrate predators we find in the fossil record are these arthrodires that lived from around 380 to 360 million years ago, in the Devonian.  They belong to an early group of jawed fish that are now completely extinct.  From here to the present we see an ever more impressive array of top marine predators in the fossil record, each more terrifying looking than the last. Once big vertebrates were on the scene, the age of arthropod top predators was over. Vertebrates could reach body sizes that no arthropod could hope to equal, and with that came corresponding speed and bite force.

Going back to the evolution of shared virtual spaces, I am now beginning to think of MMORPGs as an early experiment that succeeded despite the technological limitations of the time by stealing crunchy mechanics from other games.  These mechanics helped to create the illusion of a world, and allowed them to succeed despite primitive graphics and a first hour experience full of absolute confusion for many players. These days any visuals or interactions that you care to represent are possible to render digitally.  Instead of creating the illusion of a world with mechanical depth, games can create the illusion of a world by simply rendering it in nearly photorealistic detail and putting a lot of stuff to interact with in it.  That is actually a much better mass market solution than crunchy RPG mechanics.  For example, most people have no interest whatsoever in understanding something as arcane as how stats really work in Everquest, or how you build out a legendary item in LoTRO.  But do they want to run around in an extremely well realized shared digital world and have all kinds of adventures?  Hell yes, almost everyone can see how that is fun.

This terrifying animal, Livyatan, was larger than a modern sperm whale.  From the arthrodires (above) we see a gradual, but certainly not linear, progression of vertebrate marine top predators.  Giant lobe finned fish, Ichthyosaurs, Pliosaurs, Mososaurs, even a 40 foot long marine snake.  All of this culminated in the two largest macro-raptorial animals that ever lived (unless Ichthyotitan was actually predatory and not a planktivore).  Megaladon, a giant shark that only seems to have died out about 3.6 million years ago, you have almost certainly heard of.  Livyatan overlapped with it in space and time.  Unlike modern sperm whales that basically slurp up giant squid like they are big scary noodles, this species was an active predator going after prey much closer in size to its own.  It was up to 60 feet long and absolutely used those teeth to take giant bites out of other whales.  Both this species and Megaladon lived in an oddball ecosystem where there were tons of baleen whales about the size of a gray whale.  In this environments both sharks and hypercarnivorous whales evolved to be the tigers to these planktivorous whale antelope.

I also suspect that is why we have started to see more and more games that aren't MMORPGs begin to incorporate MMO elements, and in turn why the market for MMORPGs has stagnated.  Other types of games have started to take over that market niche.  What we are seeing now is the inevitable transition from arthropod top predators to vertebrate top predators that can engage a wider variety of players and do so much faster.*  Once you can digitally represent anything you can think of,  distracting players with crunchy mechanics and endless statistical complexity becomes completely unnecessary.  And much like how the endoskeletons of vertebrates are a superior basis for top predator compared to the exoskeletons of arthropods, design elements that generate player immersion almost as soon as you stick your head into a space are a much better starting point for mass market shared digital worlds than crunchy RPG mechanics that a casual "five-minute impression" player (1) may not notice or (2) may even be turned off by if they do.

Like a vertebrate, cephalopods have a "muscles on the outside" design (in their case the arms consist of a solid bands of muscle surrounding a central nerve cord) and can get very large.  Much larger than any arthropod. In fact, cephalopods have kind of always been waiting in the wings, and would likely be quite happy to take over the top predator role if vertebrates ever really stumble.**  Will invertebrates retake the marine top predator crown at some point in the future?    While that would no doubt be a fascinating development, and I'd love to see what kind of designs they would come up with (if I were immortal and could watch the whole thing play out) I have to admit I doubt it.  Fish are so abundant and diverse that even if all the current big ones (along with marine mammals) got wiped out, some other fish would probably take over in a half million years or so. In a similar vein, I'm not betting my retirement on a major western MMORPG revival any time soon, as much as it would delight me. 

 
Now I love me some crunchy RPG mechanics, don't get me wrong.  I am honestly a bit sad to see games like LoTRO, SWTOR, and many similar ones that I love (and started this blog largely to talk about) start to fade from the limelight.  But I won't be too upset!  A ton of innovation is happening in the space of shared digital environments right now, and quite frankly I can't wait to see what comes next. 

That said, every time a new MMORPG comes out I will be rooting for it.  "You go little sea scorpion, show them what you can do!"

*We (or at least our wallets) are the prey in this analogy, obviously.  However it really breaks down when you consider that many of us are actually swimming around, hoping to get eaten (at least for a year or two at a stretch).

**I left cephalopods largely out of the narrative because it becomes much more nebulous if you include them.  It's clear that there were and are some very large ones, but exactly how often any ecosystem had one that was able to compete with vertebrates on close to even footing for the overall top predator spot is not clear at all. In moderns oceans only a few sharks and whales are able to feed on a large adult of the largest squid species.  There have always been rumors of absolutely monstrously large individuals, but most evidence indicates that Colossal squid top out at around a half ton (though absolutely still nothing you want to run into while swimming!).  

Are MMORPGs an evolutionary dead end? Where they came from and where they are (part I)

This post over at Inventory Full, got my wheels turning.  Well, it's actually about three posts, the middle one is the one I am talking about.*  The premise is that big budget MMORPGs are pretty well dead, and that going forward the only new and successful ones we get will have small budgets aimed at a niche audience.  While I feel that the Asian "big budget" MMO market may still have some legs in it, by-and-large I have to agree.  Further, the few Asian MMOs I have tried (most recently one on my phone) really were not enjoyable to me .  While often pretty games with visually interesting settings, they mainly seemed designed to get you to pay to bypass various grinds. 

This also seems like a good opportunity to step back and think about where shared digital spaces are at in general.  However, I feel like some context helps with that, at least if you want to do it at a really high level.  So let's back way way out, and think about the history of online multiplayer games and virtual social spaces.  At first just having any kind of shared digital environment where there were avatars run by other players was quite novel.  Games doing that with honest-to-Christ graphics are way older than most people think.  However, during the 1990s is where we can see evolution of shared digital spaces really start to take off. A bit of an adaptive radiation in the parlance of evolutionary biology.  

Message boards, social spaces where you can hang out and have an asynchronous conversation,  had been going strong for a while.**  MUDs had also been going strong, but the two had really remained largely distinct entities though most of the 80s, or so I have read (I was in middle school in the mid- 80s and didn't even dial into my first local BBS until around 1989). However in the 90s with much wider adoption of the internet, and especially the popularization of the web around the mid 90s, shared spaces on the internet really began to take off.  Message boards started to become really mainstream, with a lot of websites built for other purposes even embedding some kind of message board into themselves (back then every single news story on the internet didn't have a comment box at the bottom . . . different times).  For example, IGN is a direct descendant of a N64 gaming focused news site with integrated message boards I used to hang out on around 1998.  This was all obvious to pretty much anyone on the internet back then.

However, much less obvious, save to fairly hardcore PC gamers, was all the innovation going on in shared virtual playgrounds.  There was a real hunger for places to hang out in that felt like actual physical places rather than a disembodied asynchronous conversation on a BBS or Usenet, and a lot of people were trying to figure out how to deliver that. In the MUD space all sorts of bizarre experiments were attempted.  MUDs were an especially fertile ground for experiments because coding up new rules for environments described by text is pretty straight forward (at least compared to building your own shared graphical environment from scratch!).  Programs to implement basic MUD architecture and modify it as you see fit were also really common and well documented back then.  For example by the late 80s you could hardly download a big IBM game compilation without at least one being in there, or at least that was my experience. MUDs also worked well with primitive 1980s and 1990s tech because the human imagination can be a pretty powerful graphics processor, as anyone that has ever read a book is likely aware.  

The mid-1990s is when things began to really accelerate. Suddenly almost everyone had at least heard of the internet, if not headed there themselves to hang out on message boards, set up a primitive website or track down kinky images.  During this time the game graphics needed to represent a world also evolved at a startling pace.  In console space, the progression in graphical fidelity from the Super Nintendo (1990) to the PS1/ N64 (1994) to the PS2/ Gamecube/ Dreamcast / Xbox (1999) was absolutely flabbergasting.  Each generation made the one before it look positively primitive.  While a little more granular on the PC end, as better and better hardware become standard equipment a similar progression was also happening there.  In the background data compression algorithms that would allow a server in one place to keep track of more and more information about the characters being run by players on multiple systems all over the world also continued to improve.  Back in the parlance of evolutionary biology, key innovations that would allow games to fill a new market niche were being developed.  There were early forays into online PvP, some of which like Doom, Quake and Half-life became wildly popular even in the 90s.  However, those represented baby steps, and were still quite removed from a fictional world you all hang out in together (unless by "hang out" you mean run around a small map and shoot each other in the face).  Regardless, it become very clear that it was only a matter of time before we would get shared virtual spaces that felt like some kind of alternate reality.   Science fiction authors like Donaldson and Gibson saw it coming, and had been telling us how awesome it was going to be for years.

While Meridian 59 and a few others came out first, arguably the games that first delivered on the promise of a shared virtual reality in a really rich and immersive way were Ultima Online and Everquest at the very end of the 1990s.  The way that they delivered that "virtual world" feel was pretty clever.  They took the rich mechanical detail of PC roleplaying games, Ultima VIII in one instance and DikuMUD in another, and used that to breath life into the somewhat simple shared graphical user environments that technology of the time was capable of rendering and keeping track of.  The worlds themselves were fairly primitive, if sprawling and filled with a lot to explore, and even for the time the graphics were pretty basic.  However, when you are in a world that is thought out in such detail, where there are hundreds of vendors to interact with, entire poorly rendered continents to explore, piles of loot to dig through, and even books to find and read, the fact that the graphics weren't cutting edge didn't really matter.  Those games felt like real places whether they looked like one or not.

Of course Everquest was insanely successful, and that let to the next wave (DAoC, Anarchy Online, COH, and many others).  Then WoW iterated on EQ, smoothing out the most punishing mechanics of the first generation, and was an order of magnitude more successful than EQ.  This led to many big budget MMOs chasing WoW sized audiences with a similar design that basically be summarized as  "DikuMUD mechanics stuffed into a shared 3D  rendered world."   Some like LoTRO, SWTOR, EQ II and even the original EQ remain among my favorite games to this day.   Up through at least 2012 these games were thriving, with what seemed like an endless variety of new ones to try out.  Even back in 2008 I had spent time in more than a dozen of them.

The modern era: where I hope the long rambling intro starts to pay off. 

However,  more recently we have seen this lineage of games start to die out.  Since Elder Scrolls Online, which came out in 2014, the only even moderately successful new western big budget MMORPG I can think of is Amazon's New World.  And even that us regarded as an overall disappointment by many.   I have to agree with Bhagpuss's take that the only successful games in that genre going forward are likely going to be ones that aim for a niche audience and budget accordingly.  We have even recently had a very dramatic example of a game crashing and burning on launch because the developer hallucinated that they could expect a large audience for a game that costs $60 to get into.  It really feels like there just isn't a big enough market for that kind of game to generate a return on investment for a budget in the tens or hundreds of millions any more.  When the new ones come out and flop onto the beach to die a painful death  while the internet watches, I honestly kind of feel bad for the developers at this point.

Yet, surely the appetite for shared digital worlds and virtual playgrounds hasn't diminished?  For example, based on audience size, the manga and anime Sword Art Online seem to envision a world that many find compelling, and one would assume that developers find aspirational.  Fortnite and Roblox are two of the most successful games in human history, and it is as hybrid gaming and social spaces that they really succeed for a certain audience.  So it seems like there is still a very large consumer niche that can be profitable for anyone that fills it.   So what is behind this change in fortunes for MMORPGs?

I decided to split this post up since it was way too long for me to expect someone to read in one sitting, though if you did make it through the full version I posted yesterday, congrats!  Second half to be reposted tomorrow.

*And his response to my response below.

**These are obviously still going strong in the form of Reddit, Discord and a whole host of message boards like GAMEFAQS and MMORPG.com.  You could even argue that blogs are part of this lineage.

***I stuck my head in a few MUDs back then but the few I tired seemed pointlessly clunky and slow paced compared to the ascii graphics roguelikes I was into at the time.

Sometimes a really boring story makes for the best children's book: Gemini's Story Book

The Story Book feature of Gemini is a hell of a lot of fun.  I used text from an old blog post to create a story book, and it did a very good job adding little details to fill out my account into a full story:

The Master of Fate

Interestingly, the first time I forgot to tell it to pitch the book at adults, and it generated something a lot more light hearted:  

The Curious Traveler

Finally, I asked it to create one  based on my really boring adventure in SWG from the same post above:

The Grind

To me it's actually a much more entertaining than the first one, which runs completely counter to the point I was trying to make in the post!  However, Gemini somehow figured out I was talking about a MMO, and added appropriate small details, which is quite impressive. It also came up with a title that encapsulates the point I was going for quite well.

Another surprise I got when trying to find the Storybook feature I first read about on Bhagpuss's blog, is that there is a small press that published children's books called Gemini Books.*  I have to think that Gemini becoming synonymous with AI produced children's books could do some damage to their brand.  I wonder how that will play out. 

It's also hard to believe that this blog has been active for longer now than it was after I first started it.  I fired it up in 2008 and then shut it down in 2012.  However, I came back in 2018 and now have posted at least a little for eight full years.  I even have a mostly written post comparing MMORPGs to eurypterids that will go up soonish, and I feel like three posts a year still counts as "active."  Happy hunting regardless, and thanks for stopping by!

*Oddly, that publisher has become much harder to find on Google today, I had to use Bing to get that link.

What is a good story anyway? Storytelling in LoTRO and the value of art

Bhagpuss recently put up an interesting post about Wuthering Waves that got me thinking about storytelling in MMOs, and the Lord of the Rings Online specifically.  I have started playing LoTRO again mainly because I was forced to.  The 32 bit servers are going to be permanently closed some time in August, and since LoTRO is one of my most played games I didn't want to lose all of my characters. After updating the client on a new PC that I recently migrated to, I transferred all my characters to one of the new 64 bit servers: Peregrine.  That's the North American roleplay server.  I figured most of the serious Tolkien lore grognards would move there, as so far World Chat has certainly not disappointed on that count. 

My main Silene, now and forevermore Sileeyn because the only name I was super attached to was taken on the server I chose.  I mean I guess I could have left her Silene-1 going forward, but I think that would have annoyed me even more.  Still, at least all my other names were available. 

The process of moving was painless.  I clicked one button to select all the characters on Arkenstone, and by the time I logged out and back in to my new server everyone was there.  Perhaps even more miraculous, nothing appears to be missing from their banks and all of my character names save one were still available.  However, of course, the name of my level 100 main "Silene" was taken.*  I had to switch her to "Sileeyn," which still slightly annoys me when I glance at her on the character select screen.

The last time I was playing it heavily I remembered quite liking the storytelling.  But over the years (it's been about four since I last logged), I had started to become skeptical of the stories being all that well done, and thought maybe it was just rosy goggles talking.  I mean they are presented solely as flat text, and it's not uncommon to have several quests all pointing you towards killing boars, or bears, or bandits in the exact same zone.  How entertaining could six quests in row about killing boars really be?  And how could a flat text presentation compare to the voice acting in Secret World, or the full voice acting and branching storylines of SWTOR?

The character I started to relearn the game, and since I wanted an excuse to adventure in the Shire again which I remembered finding quite charming.  The horse is one she got for the 15 year anniversary, one of the two 68% runspeed horses all of my new characters get when I roll one.  I also get an absolutely insane amount of slower horses, cosmetics, titles, character frames, fireworks and other assorted stuff to dig through.  On any new character usually put most of it in the bank unopened, almost immediately losing most of my bank space (until I can save up enough gold for more) forever since I never open any of it . . .

Now that I have played it again for a few evenings, I remember why I liked it so much.  It's because a lot of the stories work on two completely different levels.  On the surface they are entertaining stories on par with the better ones from say, EQ II or ESO. You get a strong sense of the personality of everyone you interact with, and many of the hobbit stories make me smile.  For example, there is an NPC ranting in the town square of Michel Delving about a conspiracy to deny equal access to the best pie fillings to everyone in the Shire, with  the uppity Tooks hoarding all the freshest ingredients.  Both the impassioned speech and the very funny responses from other hobbits standing nearby just ooze with the same charm as a lot of what Tolkien himself wrote about hobbits.   

But if you only appreciate the game based strictly on what is presented, a lot of what is on offer isn't really exceptionally well done.  Even World of Warcraft has some quests telling stories just as well written, and I don't consider that a particularly good MMO for narratives (just the opposite in many cases).  I wouldn't be surprised for anyone that isn't a fan of Tolkien to have the exact same reaction as Bhagpuss: "LotRO to me is just a lot of meaningless fetch and kill quests strung together. Which, honestly, is no bad thing in terms of gameplay but does absolutely nothing for me in terms of telling a story." 

Lathrae (another flower genus) is a Warden, which is a fairly technical class.  Every combination of three different skills triggers a different "gambit" which can range from massive burst damage, DoTs that can be stacked, taunts, heals or increased defense.  She can also switch between a melee and ranged stance on the fly, which also changes the output of a lot of her gambits.  It's a character that can handle almost any situation if you can keep all the combos straight in your head.   

It's really the second level the stories work on that elevates them.  In addition to being competent and at having text prose that is at least (but perhaps only) slightly above average for the genre, many of the stories are also filling in little details from the books in a way that is quite well done and satisfying.  For example, if you are familiar with Unfinished Tales, you know that Saruman was smuggling pipe weed out of the Shire and trying to keep it secret from Gandalf and the other members of the white council.  In public he ridiculed Gandalf for smoking it, and was too embarrassed to admit that he too enjoyed the stuff once he got around to trying it.  Gandalf knew that Saruman was sneaking it out of the Shire, but just assumed that Saruman being so secretive about it was a bit of harmless vanity.  In any case, at the end of an entertaining six step quest chain, you stumble on his smuggling operation and even get to read a note from "Sharkey" to his agents.**

At some point while I was away Standing Stone Games finally figured out how to have deeds work in a way that is decently fun.  The last time I played you had to grind out a bunch of these if you wanted access to all your trait points, which was quite annoying.  Now you get those just from levelling, like every other MMO with trait trees.  Instead deeds grant a small amount of points for the item shop, points towards virtues, and the occasional cool title.  Deeds primarily consist of killing large numbers of a specific mob type in a zone, but also include exploration (like finding all six farms in the Shire), questing and simply using certain abilities often.

That's just one example, a lot of neat details like that get filled in by quests in the game.  The writers use Tolkien's fiction like wooden frame that they fill in with a building paying homage to the work it draws upon.  As delightful as I find this element, I think it also explains why a lot of players don't actually find the storytelling as compelling as I do in LoTRO.  I personally would put it right up there with Secret World and SWTOR as some of the most solid storytelling you will find in a multiplayer game.  However, I have to think a lot of players don't recognize most of the callbacks to the source material. 

Virtues themselves grant your character small statistical boosts, and you can decide which ones you are interested in levelling.  Though for me personally most of these may as well not even be options, since I pretty much always go for the ones with swords by them for MOAR Damage.  This character is so fresh that I haven't even levelled the first three virtues for low level slots.  I like that virtues start with relatively low cap so you won't feel obligated to spend more time than you care to working on deeds.  You can pick three, get those up to six, and then completely forget about the system until much higher levels if you wish.

Unfortunately, you can't really appreciate the stories on both levels unless you are intimately familiar with the Lord of the Rings, including the Appendices of LoTR, the Hobbit and at the very least Unfinished Tales. Knowing the Silmarillion and the newer compilations collected by Christopher Tolkien and others doesn't hurt a bit.  For example, many of the stories set in Near Harad are actually rooted in brief notes about how Númenorians colonized the region in the second age, and a civil war between the Northern and Southern Kingdoms of Gondor during the third age.  To really fully appreciate some of what you see in those regions, you likely need to have read the Silmarillion, the Appendices, and the Fall of Númenor.  Some of the latter material has never been published previously save in the twelve volume History of Middle Earth.  I consider myself a pretty hardcore Tolkien nerd, but twelve volumes of apocrypha is way too much even for me.  Regardless, it's clear the game relies heavily on a player being a fan of the IP to "pop", which in the end almost certainly reduces their audience.***

The Shire is one of my favorite adventuring zones in any game, because it absolutely oozes with the charm and gentle humor of Tolkien's descriptions of hobbits.  This impassioned speech is about how the best pie fillings are being unfairly distributed.

This also raise a more general question in my mind: can you consider storytelling good if only those deeply versed in something outside of what is being presented can fully appreciate it?  I am of two minds about it.  On the one hand, there is a school of thought that for art to be "good" in some kind of objective sense, it must be enjoyable for almost anyone that takes the time to really consider it.  For example, during the Classical period composers intentionally simplified their compositions compared the Baroque composers that preceded them.  This was in part because Baroque compositions were considered too complex, and too difficult to appreciate for a typical listener.  The Classical composers wanted their compositions to be more accessible to a wider audience.  As my music appreciation professor explained it when I was an undergrad, the idea was that nearly any sane person should be able to enjoy the compositions.  This is sometime referred to as part of the classical ideal of universality.*!*

The game also fills in a lot of neat little details from the books in a way that is respectful to the source material.  For example, at the end of a long quest chain where I have been trying to figure out what happened to the hobbit locked in the cage on the left, I have discovered brigands that have been stealing pipe-weed for "Sharkey."  It's an oblique reference to material in Unfinished Tales, and a very cool easter egg....but only if you are deeply versed in Tolkien lore.

On the other hand, that kind of thinking is one step away from arguing that only the simplest pop art has any real value.  In my experience, if you are patient enough, art (by which I mean to include visual, written, musical or even game formats that combine all three at once) that makes you work a little bit to appreciate it tends to have a lot more staying power than something you can fully appreciate the first time you experience it.  I'm not sure myself where I draw the line between needless pretension or absurd "homework" expectations and art that I find complex and thought provoking.  But for me personally LoTRO is definitely on the correct side of that line, and I'll take Bach or Stravinsky over Mozart any day of the week :-)**!*   

*According to the character creation screen in LoTRO, female hobbits often have flower inspired names.  Silene is a genus of flowering plants, and I thought it sounded neat for a hunter that might be expected to take out foes before they even know she is there.

**That is the same pseudonym that Saruman uses much later when he scours the Shire in the Lord of the Rings books. 

***The first thing I posted here that got any traction was a designed to help you decide whether the game might be for you, and to poke some gentle fun at a few people that not only didn't enjoy the game much but actually seemed actively offended that the game dared to exist.  It's been a long time since the game has been visible enough to attract that kind of attention, which is in at least some ways better for all involved.

*!*It was way harder than I expected it to be to find a good reference to back up what I remembered from that music appreciation course I took over 20 years ago.  In my experience, Gemini is often making Google worse for really specialized searches.  It seems to now answer what it assumes you mean to ask rather than what you actually type.  I had to use three different sets of search terms get to that link, and it's still a bit off from what I had in mind.

**!*Except for Requiem, that's awesome.

Modern SWTOR Part II: the game in 2024

The last time I thought about returning to SWTOR was when Legacy of the Sith came out.*'*  The new cinematic had me hoping that it would be an expansion at least on par with Onslaught.  However, reports from when it came out almost immediately put me off of that idea, with the new content clocking in at about two hours per faction, and not even a new daily area to engage with after that (at least at launch). The development team behind the game claimed that the rest of a proper expansion would be released piecemeal over the course of the following months.  But without so much as a calendar of expected release dates, I was more than a bit skeptical.  The move of the game from Bioware to Broadsword, which has not done the greatest job with Dark Age of Camelot, moved me from skeptical to downright pessimistic. However, as it turned out I was largely wrong.

Eight days fifteen hours and thirty minutes:  that's how long it took me to do a level one to the end of the current storyline run, which for me was about half a year of my really limited spare time.  To try and keep my level closer to what each planet was designed for, and to give myself some time to enjoy each new gear set I got together, I purposefully skipped all XP bonuses.  However, I did do every solo quest I came across, including "exploration missions,"  which have the special icon shown above. These are side quests that used to be necessary to hit the cap in the launch era game.  However, in the modern game they are eminently skippable.  You could ignore all of them and still be over leveled for most planets when you get there.  I love doing them because they send me to areas of each planet I wouldn't likely explore otherwise.  I guess I could simply wander around at random and see everything that way, but I find exploring an area more engaging if I'm there for a reason.

The team has indeed released a proper expansion's worth of content since the launch of LoTS.  If you count everything released since February 2022 as one big expansion, it has more new planets and daily areas than anything released since the launch game.  It just took them two solid years to put out all that content.  Does a set of new zones still count as a single expansion if you release it in four to six month intervals for 2+ years?  Hard to say, but the fact remains that there is now a lot of solid content remaining after you finish the old base game. 

At some point while I was away they added galactic seasons, where you work your way towards long term goals by playing.  This season came with two armor sets, a couple of new vehicles, and a new stronghold.  While there were quests I could have done to speed my progress, I was able to get to the end of the track largely by doing whatever I felt like. I still have four out the eight class stories completely untouched on my new server.  However, I can imagine that this system would give me something worth doing on my schedule if I were done with that and stuck at the cap. I like the system a lot so far, but I also have the impression that season six was one of the better ones.

Based on my current play time, it takes about four solid days to play through the old base game.  This includes skipping all the group content, but doing all the optional exploration quests.  By the time I reached the end of the latest content added with Desperate Defiance, I had clocked in 8 days 15 hours and 30 minutes of playtime.  That is a heck of a lot of Star Wars to get through, and apart from the stuff that came out around 2016-2017 I enjoyed every bit of it.  You also don't need to do that middle part of the game anymore, because at some point Bioware added the ability to skip straight from Ziost to Ossus.*  Ossus is where I feel like the game picks up again after the old pre-Knights of the Fallen Empire content, and even after Ossus there is a lot to do now. 

Flying into the republic fleet to learn some new crafting recipes.  This star fleet functions somewhat like a capital city in most MMOs.  My ship is the smaller one in the middle.  Each class gets its own unique ship that functions as a portable headquarters, and is needed for most travel between planets.  

SWTOR stands as a fairly unique offering in the modern MMO landscape.  The science fiction meets fantasy setting of Star Wars in general sets it apart of course, with 90% of MMOs being pure fantasy and most of the rest being pure science fiction. I have always enjoyed the setting of Star Wars in general, and SWTOR is set during my favorite era.  In "modern" Star Wars there are only ever two sith at a time, and there are often only a handful of trained jedi (as few as two depending on the timeframe).  This kind of warps the entire setting around a few key figures, and sometimes makes it seem as if something that doesn't happen anywhere near Luke, Vader or one of the other incredibly rare force users is kind of irrelevant.  It also makes it hard to believe that you would be playing a jedi or a sith.  It would be like playing "A president of the united states" or "A Emperor of Rome."  It hardly makes any sense.  

Crafting is in a good overall place in the modern game, at least while levelling.  It's dead easy to make level appropriate blue gear most of the way up, and relatively easy to make purple gear.  Blue quality gear that you craft can be deconstructed for a 60% chance to learn the recipe for a purple quality item.  These crafted purples are higher quality than anything else you are likely to run across while levelling.  That said, by level 75 the crafting really tapers off, with gear from various NPC vendors completely eclipsing gear that's easy to craft.  You can in theory craft gear just as good, but the time and resources that would be needed to do it are utterly absurd.  

In contrast, during the Old Republic Era, you are tripping over force users.  It allows stories set anywhere and everywhere to leverage the "space wizards meets Firefly" feel of the movies without creating logical dissonance.  It also makes it seem a lot more realistic that, for example, my smuggler would be willing to take on a sith or my imperial agent would take on a jedi.  While certainly powerful, force users aren't gods walking.  During the Old Republic era, if you don't know how to deal with a force user you won't be in a profession that involves serious amounts of combat for very long.  In the modern movie era, meeting a jedi would be like meeting an wizard as powerful as Merlin in real life.  "Wait, magic is real? How in the hell do you even fight that?"  I also like that no-one knows or cares about the Skywalker name.  The idea of an ordained chosen one that makes everyone else in the galaxy largely irrelevant offends my egalitarian streak.**  All in all, I feel like the Old Republic era leverages the most distinct aspects of the Star Wars IP with much less of the continuity baggage that can sometimes trip up fiction set in the Skywalker era.

The new stronghold everyone got for free this season is in Copero, a pretty planet largely inhabited by the chiss (the same race as Admiral Thrawn from the Star Wars TV shows Rebels and Asoka if that means anything to you).  Since I was playing up a chiss agent, this suited me quite well. 

Mechanically, I also find the game really enjoyable.  It's one of the few MMOs I can think of that does level scaling well.  Instead of the enemies scaling along with you, which makes levelling seem completely pointless, you have a level cap and a soft stat cap that changes depending on the planet you are on.  If you go to a low level planet with a high level character, you will get scaled down but still feel more powerful because you have more abilities and stronger attack rotations.  At the same time, you never "gray out" any enemies and become an immortal godling that certain enemies cannot challenge in any way.  You can always get killed if you play badly enough.

One of the things I really like about SWTOR is that the combat generally focuses on groups of mobs rather than trying to pull one at a time.  The strategy you use with a big group of weak mobs, like here, will be different from what you use against various group combinations that include silvers (roughly twice as strong as a normal mob) or golds (around 1.5 times as strong as a silver) mobs.  It gives the combat, even while out questing solo, more variety than in most MMOs.

A major change since the last time I played is that you can use a much wider variety of skillsets on characters now.  Choice of combat style has been largely separated from choice of class, and thus class narrative, allowing you to mix and match freely for whatever combination you like.  For example, if you want your jedi to be a secret sith that sprays force lightning everywhere when no-one is looking, you can do it.  If you think your bounty hunter would specialize in taking foes down with a sniper rifle you can do that too.  If you refuse to play any character that can't kick opponents in the nuts, you can now play four different class stories using smuggler combat styles.  At the same time, if you are a purist the original combat styles work pretty much like they always have.  You can still play up an agent that plays exactly like you remember from the 2010s if you want to.  

My favorite mini-game in SWTOR is Star Fighter, a PvP system that plays a lot like MechWarrior Online or World of Tanks among games I'm familiar with.  Teams fight to hold bases or engage in deathmatches.  As you play you earn points that can be used to upgrade one of sixteen or so starships.  Ships are split into four classes, dogfighters, interceptors, gunners and bombers, each of which plays very differently.  My favorite class is the bomber (one of my four is shown above), which has high defense and specializes in taking and defending bases.  However, in matches with no objectives to defend, they tend to be pretty useless, so I have had to build out some fighters and interceptors.  I suck quite badly with gunships, and so haven't bothered to build any ships of that class up.  

The game has also added  mechanics for player engagement stolen from Android games. Despite how terrible that sounds, they work surprisingly well.  First, there are now daily login rewards, like pretty much every MMO these days.  In SWTOR they are nice little bonuses, but nothing so amazing you will be upset if you can't log for a few days.  However, the bigger addition is seasonal reward tracks that each run for a few months and allow you to work towards bigger rewards at your own pace.  The last PvE track that I worked through yielded two sets of cosmetic armor,*** two new mounts and unlocked rooms in a pretty new house (stronghold) as I worked through it.  Each day you will move the track along just by playing.  Though you can go out of your way and progress it more quickly by doing specific missions, I maxed out the last one just by doing whatever I felt like each day.  There is a similar parallel track to work your way through by doing PvP matches.  I have made no progress on the latter because I rarely enjoy PvP.   However, I like that there are different reward tracks catering to different playstyles.  Now maybe if there was a track for crafting stims or dancing near mailboxes everyone would be happy . . .  

What the game is generally known for among MMOs is dialogue trees, one example of which is shown above, that slightly alter the storyline as you play.  Some of them lead to fairly significant changes like characters dying off or being saved, or in one case an entire planet perhaps getting destroyed (though it will get locked into a "just about to blow up, finish what you need to do" state in that case).  However, for the most part they are largely cosmetic changes to the storyline, with characters you interact with reacting differently depending on whether you are a saint, a complete asshole, or something in between. That isn't to say that the choices don't alter the feel of the narrative significantly.  I put real thought into the personality of most characters I play, and even get a bit upset if there are no dialogue options in one of these trees that does a good job reflecting "what my character would say." That's light years beyond the roleplaying options in most MMOs, which tend to occur completely in your head if at all.****  

If there is any overriding theme of the modern game it's player choice.  How long it takes you to run up to the cap is really up to you.  On my playthroughs I do every quest I come across that isn't for groups, including the optional "exploration missions," but not generally bonus missions (extra missions for players that want to revisit a planet later, some time after completing the main story there).  If you stopped to do all the group content and bonus missions, I imagine you could double my playtime.  On the other hand, if you stick strictly to only what's needed to hit the appropriate level for each new planet, I'm sure you could at least half it.  Crafting is in a similar place.  It's there and useful, you can pretty easily be using level appropriate purple gear all the way up if you engage with it.  However, you also very clearly don't really need gear that good.  You will be hitting your soft stat caps even with gear from quests on every planet unless you really rush things and do no optional content at all.  

Though the income of the game is much reduced from the days when it was hovering just outside the big five, with the move to Broadsword it does seem that a large proportion of the income the game brings in is finally being reinvested instead of frittered away on other games. Overall, I'd say SWTOR is in a better place than it has been in years.

Regardless, for me the biggest selling point is that there is a very long "Star Warsy" narrative on offer with a lot of variety depending on the choices you make as you go, and very little overlap between the Imperial and Republic perspectives.  Other MMOs with similarly compelling narratives, such as FFIV and Secret World, generally only have one story to play through for everyone.  All in all, I would say SWTOR is in the best place that it's been in years.   Mechanically, it's maybe not quite to the heights of the launch-to-Revan era game to my tastes, but damn close.  Further, if playing through a Star Wars story is a selling point for you, the game that starts after you hit the end of the launch era game is now finally just as expansive as the game to that point.

*'*Edit: You can read about what I though of the game to that point here. 

*Though I often still play through the parts you can skip, because the game defaults to certain story choices when you choose the skip option.  Those often don't fit what my character would have done.  If they ever add the ability to tell the game what choices you would have made going through those chapters, I might never play them again.

**One of the things I really liked about the Last Jedi is that it ended implying that the force was for everyone.  One of the things I found really execrable about the Rise of Skywalker was that they completely undid that, and made the story about a "chosen one" again.

***Well at least that's how I use it.  You can in theory gather up a bunch of mods and give them any stats you like, though I am a bit skeptical that anyone would ever bother. 

****Makeb, shown in the screenshot above, was the first planet released that allowed you to have gay flings with NPCs.  In the old base game, flirt interactions were gender locked and strictly hetero.  In more modern content, you can eventually make out with pretty much anyone you spend enough time with.  Of course even that freedom pales before the freedom some really modern games offer.  

Modern SWTOR Part I: Launch to the "Knights of" era

Since about January my main MMO has been Star Wars: The Old Republic.  It is likely roughly tied with Lord of the Rings Online for the game that I actively played for the longest stretch.  I subbed up the day of launch in December 2011, and stayed subbed until the 5.2 patch after Iokath was released, which I believe was in April 2017.  That is nearly six solid years subbed up and logging in, which for me is a hell of a long run on any game.  I love the Star Wars setting, and I love the variety of outcomes you can get on different playthroughs of SWTOR due to each class having a different 1-50 story, and dialogue choices.  For most that that time I was happy as a clam, or a pig in mud, or whatever your favorite animal based euphemism for contentment may be. Unfortunately, Bioware seemed to completely lose their way  around 2016 with the launch of Knights of the Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne, and to my tastes it took a really long time for the game to recover.

Shown here is a map of one part of Corellia,  and the kind of content I was accustomed to until Knights of the Fallen Empire came out.  The map on the left is the zone I am currently exploring, which has a ton of nooks and crannies, places that serve no purpose save to enhance immersion like a bar with a working juke box, and perhaps a dozen quests.  This is itself just one zone of a larger planet, which has five areas of roughly the same size.  The switch from this style of expansive explorable content to the tiny zones with little to see of the "Knight's of" expansions, cerca 2016, felt like a major downgrade to me.  It took years for the developers to get back to this style of worldbuilding.  

I had a lot of issues with the game during the "Knights of" era.  My biggest gripe was the switch from open world areas, that felt like actual planets, to a really linear storyline that played like a visual novel and a MMO had a love child. That isn't to say that the expansions didn't have some engaging stories in them.  There are actually excellent on your first playthrough, and I enjoyed them quite a bit when they first came out.  Both Knights of expansions contain polished content with high production values, and feel very cinematic the first time you see them.  However, they offer very little new on subsequent playthroughs. Choices offered turn out to be largely flavor once you have tried out several of them, and Empire and Republic characters get completely identical stories.  In addition there are very few open world exploration zones, and even in those few little really worth discovering. Perhaps worst of all, the moment-to-moment gameplay consists largely of cutscenes interspersed with some of the most bland and repetitive fights SWTOR has to offer.  Tons of nearly identical corridors are stuffed with mobs that you have to take down to progress to the next cutscene.    

This is the view out of the republic spaceport on Corellia. It's likely one of the least attractive planets in the game, and I still think it's an impressive sight. This also is a  tiny section of the map above. Even back in 2011 SWTOR was considered an ugly game by many, and nowadays the graphics are often considered almost laughably bad.  Maybe it's because I grew up in the Atari / Nintendo era, but I have always found these criticisms completely baffling.  For a game that runs well on a toaster, I think the graphics are quite impressive. 

So in KotET and KotFE, we got expansions that for me were strong at first glance but rapidly became really boring on repeated playthroughs.  This was in sharp contrast to the rest of the game where high replayability was a major strength.  Overall, the gameplay in KoTET and KotFE ended up feeling like a major downgrade compared to the game up until that point.  For me that was compounded by the gearing system of the 5.0 era.  Until 5.0 end game instances and PvP rewarded points that you could save up and use to eventually buy the gear set of your choice, like pretty much every other MMO.  However, Bioware seemed to think this was letting players gear up too quickly at the cap.  Seemingly in an attempt to try and stretch out the endgame, SWTOR  switched to a "command crates"  system where you were rewarded crates yielding gear completely at random.  The odds of any given crate having a piece of gear that was an upgrade you needed got lower and lower the closer you were to a full set at a given item level.  It was incredibly frustrating to open several crates in a row and get vendor trash out of all of them.  

As in most MMOs, the true endgame is fashion for players that aren't heavily into raiding or PvP, and SWTOR (often called "space Barbie" by players who have their tongues only slightly in their cheeks) is no different.  In fact, it's arguable better than most because in addition to your character there is a whole group of NPCs that you can also dress up.  Shown here is the squad of the current character I am playing, most of whom only have slight changes to their default gear (a helmet here, a pair of boots there).  Any humanoid companion is completely customizable, with six equipment slots to swap in and out in addition to various choices for their head.

Added to storyline that I found overly repetitive and a gearing system I hated, the pace of new content releases also started to slow to a crawl.  By Spring 2017 the only thing keeping me in the game was the hope that a new area coming out in April would be a return to form for the studio. Unfortunately, when it finally was released the new area ended up being Iokath.  To this day Iokath is probably the area of the game I enjoy the least on a normal 1-to-cap playthrough, and I cancelled my sub about a month after it came out.  After that, watching from the sidelines I saw what started as a slight content drought start to approach the Chilean desert of true maintenance mode.  

Even companions like M1-4X here, that don't wear equipment, have some customization options if you go hunting for them.  To get this paint job, I had to add two-factor authentication to my account and fly out to a space station at the edge of the galaxy to find the vendor that sold it.

After Iokath, no new explorable areas would be added until December 2018, nearly two years later.  Even that new area, Ossus*, only contained about four hours of new content.  Perhaps a week of evenings if you got serious about it and maxed out your local reputation with dailies. Stories in the gaming press of personnel assigned to SWTOR and financial resources that the game brought in being funneled into failed projects like Anthem did nothing to make me question my lack of loyalty.  For me, it only confirmed that I was right to walk away when I did.   

Flying in to Ossus to take screenshots. By the time Ossus came out it late 2018, I think Bioware had finally gotten the message that players really like having new areas worth exploring. Even a very slickly presented story isn't enough by itself to keep most players engaged, especially if it's essentially the exact same story every time you play it.

All of this kept me out of the game until Onslaught was released in late 2019.  By then it looked like enough new content, Ossus, Dantooine, and two new planets with Onslaught, had been added for it to be worth sticking my head in again.  I enjoyed Onslaught quite a bit, but it still only kept me entertained for a few months.  I considered coming back for Legacy of the Sith, but that turned out to be more like a nice patch than an actual expansion, with two or three hours of content for most players and not so much as a new daily area when it first launched.  For the last three years I have been keeping an eye on the game**, waiting for enough new content to come out for it to be worth subbing.  I would say as of the last big patch the game is finally there, and I think I'll be settling in for a while (eight months and counting).  

Once you land on Ossus you find an interesting set of zones with a unique orange sand on black basalt aesthetic, and a story that plays very differently depending on whether you are aligned with the Empire or the Republic.  Though not as large as most launch era planets, it does feel like a proper new area that is rewarding to explore.  

Based on what I've seen since I came back in January, I would say that the team has finally found their new groove.  There are a good bit of new content and activities to talk about.  It's not all peaches and kittens, but on the balance  the current game is better to my tastes than it has been in years. I thought that was what I sat down to write about, but my lead in completely got away from me.  More on the current game in the next post!

*Thought short, I did eventually find out that Ossus is excellent with a cool aesthetic and a fun little story.  That's actually a good synopsis of the modern team's development style.  They don't put out much content, but what they do release is well done and tends to feel like a solid addition to the game.

**By "keeping an eye on the game," I mainly mean reading Shintar's excellent  Going Commando.  She covers SWTOR really thoroughly, and has a generally sunny take on the game that I enjoy.